The divinization of our passivity

"the passive parts of our lives are immeasurably wider and deeper than the active."

Part of emptiness, part of poverty, is passivity. Passivity that says yes and loves in each moment God brings me to.  Poverty that 'goes where I do not want to go' like Peter, with love. Poverty of Christ chained in the garden and led to his trial.

Poverty is not doing more, it's abandoning. It's being and doing His Will as he reveals it- not as I plan it according to my liking. The only thing I have control over is how much love I live His will with.  In the moment, which is his will, love.

The sacrament of the present moment is the divinization of us in our passivity.  It is the Kingdom come.

What better guarantee of the presence of God than a life lived in love according to His will, not my own?

How long will I fight this like Jonah, like Martha, like Peter, before my FIAT is natural and constant.

Passivity... passion... our suffering... our accepting of experience undergoing the life He gives instead of forging my own... our letting God work, divinizes us by letting him live in me.

Be an apostle of his will, his love, not my own. and be at peace. he in I and my joy complete.

There is still so much selfishness in my love, in my desire to live love. In the wrestling of His will and my will disguised as His.  How patient he is with me. How he loves me.

Lord, make me remember.... in every experience, in every day...

At every moment He tells me the same thing, "I love you, love me." -Cum Clamore Valido

HOSPITALLAND AND THE DIVINIZATION OF ONE’S PASSIVITIES

by Fr. Robert BarronMay 26, 201513 Comments

Last week I spent six days at a place only about a ten-minute drive from my home, but I had, nevertheless, entered a country as “foreign” to my experience as Botswana or Katmandu. You see, I had taken up residence in Hospitalland. I will spare you all of the gory details, but I was brought in for an emergency appendectomy and then had to undergo a second surgery, due to complications. As a priest, of course, I had visited Hospitalland many times, but I had never actually lived in it for an extended period. Hospitalland has its own completely unique rhythms, customs, language, and semiotic systems. Adjusting to it, consequently, is as complex an undertaking as adjusting to Vienna, Paris, or Tokyo.

For example, the normal rhythm of day and night is interrupted and overturned in Hospitalland. You are only vaguely aware of the movement of the sun across the sky, and people come barging into your room as regularly at two in the morning as two in the afternoon. I found myself frequently asking visitors not only the time of day, but also whether it was morning or evening. Relatedly, the usual distinctions between public and private simply evanesce in Hospitalland. As my mother told me many years ago, upon returning from a long visit to that country, "When you enter the hospital, you place your modesty in a little bag and leave it by the door. Then you pick it up when you go home.” Nurses, nursing aides, medical students, doctors, surgeons, tech assistants—all of them have license to look over any part of your anatomy, pretty much whenever they want. At first, I was appalled by this, but after a few days, I more or less acquiesced: “Anyone else out there that would like to take a look?” Hospitalland has its own very distinctive language, largely conditioned by numbers: blood pressure rates, temperature, hemoglobin counts, etc. It was actually a little bit funny how quickly I began to banter with the nurses and doctors in this arcane jargon. 

But for me the characteristic of Hospitalland is passivity. When you pass through the doors of the hospital, you simply hand your life over to other people. They transport you, clean you, test you, make you wait for results (an excruciating form of psychological torture, by the way), tell you what you have to undergo next, poke you, prod you, take blood out of you, and cut into you. And when you are at your wits' end, frustrated beyond words, so eager to get home that you can taste it, you have to wait for them to give you permission to leave. You place your modesty in a little bag by the door when you enter the hospital, and you put your autonomy in that same container. 

And this is of more than merely psychological interest. It has, indeed, far-reaching spiritual implications. As I lay on my back in Hospitalland, a phrase kept coming unbidden into my mind: “the divinization of one’s passivities.” This is a line from one of the great spiritual works of the twentieth century, The Divine Milieu by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In that seminal text, Teilhard famously distinguished between the divinization of one’s activities and the divinization of one’s passivities. The former is a noble spiritual move, consisting in the handing over of one’s achievements and accomplishments to the purposes of God. A convinced Jesuit, Teilhard desired to devote all that he did (and he did a lot) ad majorem Dei gloriam (to the greater glory of God).  But this attitude, Teilhard felt, came nowhere near the spiritual power of divinizing one’s passivities. By this he meant the handing over of one’s suffering to God, the surrendering to the Lord of those things that are done to us, those things over which we have no control. We become sick; a loved one dies suddenly; we lose a job; a much-desired position goes to someone else; we are unfairly criticized; we find ourselves, unexpectedly, in the valley of the shadow of death. These experiences lead some people to despair, but the spiritually alert person should see them as a particularly powerful way to come to union with God. A Christian would readily speak here of participating in the cross of Christ. Indeed how strange that the central icon of the Christian faith is not of some great achievement or activity, but rather of something rather horrible being done to a person. The point is that suffering, offered to God, allows the Lord to work his purpose out with unsurpassed power. 

In some ways, Teilhard’s distinction is an echo of St. John of the Cross’s distinction between the “active” and “passive” nights of the soul. For the great Spanish master, the dark night has nothing to do with psychological depression, but rather with a pruning away of attachments that keep one from complete union with God. This pruning can take a conscious and intentional form (the active night) or it can be something endured. In a word, we can rid ourselves of attachments—or God can do it for us. The latter, St. John thinks, is far more powerful and cleansing than the former. 

I do believe that my stay in the foreign country of Hospitalland had a good deal to do with the divinization of my passivities and with the passive night of the soul. I certainly wouldn’t actively seek to go back to that land, but perhaps God might send me there again. May I have the grace to accept it as a gift.

“Stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.”

Jesus promises the sending of the Holy Spirit: “Stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high.” This staying and waiting is to give them a full sense of human impotence, the permanent condition of human beings until God bestows something of his own Being on us. The image of being “clothed with power” is eloquent. It hearkens back to Genesis and the human sense of nakedness and shame because of sin, and it evokes God’s clothing of Adam and Eve with leather garments out of compassion, in order to conceal his creatures’ shame for the time being. But this promised clothing now is different, since it implies an imparting of God’s own power and life. Nor is this just any kind of concealing, but rather, paradoxically, a very radical revealing. After the Father has raised Jesus from the dead and created a new Adam in Christ, that re-creation through grace is extended step by step to all believers, so that whatever has happened to Christ is now going to happen to us.

Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, The Way of the Disciple

Taizé - Veni Sancte Spiritus

Veni Sancte Spiritus

Come Holy Spirit,
from heaven shine forth
with your glorius light.

Veni Sacte Spiritus

Toi, le parfait consolateur,
merveilleuse fraîcheur.
Dans notre âme, Tu fais habiter la paix.
Dans la peine, Tu es le repos,
dans l'épreuve, la force,
dans la tristesse, la consolation.

Veni Sancte Spiritus

 Ven, dulce huésped del alma,
descanso de nuestro esfuerzo,
tregua en el duro trabajo,
brisa en las horas de fuego,
gozo que enjuga las lágrimas
y reconforta en los duelos.

Veni Sancte Spiritus

You are our only comforter,
peace of the soul.
In the heat you shade us,
in our labour you refresh us
and in trouble you are our strength.

Absence and Presence

Sometimes God's absence is his Presence...
In it he carves out in me a deeper desire, 
and a deeper capacity to receive him and be filled by him, 
to belong more to him, and him to me.

Jesus, my God,
The gifts are beautiful. The bouquets of love, smiles, friendships, family, joys... fragrant, bright, exquisite... The love letters you send me in the sunshine, the trees, the poetry around me...

But it's not enough.  With all gratitude but with an unfulfilled and aching heart I beg, give me yourself.  Your beautiful gifts make me want to share them with you.... in you... and some how increse the pain of your absence.  I want to share a life with you, share a heart with you.  I want you, Lord....

Give me perfectly Yourself,

Send me no more

A messenger

Who cannot tell me what I wish.

In the emptiness is presence. In the desire is the fulfillment. The nothing is where he gives all.

It seems to me...

On the cross he said "I thirst".  In his thirst was the fullness of love.  Emptiness is presence in the way that air fills the lungs.  Were it not there, it would be filled by something else... Were love not present, the desire would be quenched by something less.  Love desired, burns a deeper desire. my thirst is joined by Thirst. Unquecnhed, but unquenched fulfilled.

Christ was empty. He thirsted for love and to love. The will of the Father is what he thirsted for, and what consumed him. In his thirst is the consummation.

Emptiness pulls all else out of my weak heart like searing  heat consumes all hidden moisture, all hidden comfort. In my thirsting, he puts love where he finds no love.  He burns away what prevents thirst to the bone and burns into me a thirst that is only quenched as it is unquenchable.

That is the mystery & fecundity of emptiness. Of thirst. The living water thirsts on the cross, he fills and quenches.  To be one with him is to be filled and quenched, to fill and quench... and to thirst.

The hunger of the Bread of Life, the thirst of the Living Water, the dying of life himself.  There is nothing that remains on our journey in Him but Love.


He asked so much of Mary Magdelene... her shame, her thirst, her alabaster jars, her fidelity, her night, her emptiness.  And he loved her. As he loved her, she thirsted more until she was at the point of dying in the morning at the tomb... Dying of a love she couldn't cling to.  To go on to hold all things loosely, but always give love. Give love while all else falls from your hands, give love from an empty dark heart.  In the desert allow the spring of living water, the Thirst of God, to flow and to quench even as you die of dryness. Noli me tangere.... but love.

Love from the darkness, from and in His darkness, in the darkness of a world lost where his heart is present.  He is with Him in his passion, his night, Show them he is there by a faith that dares joy. Suffering with them... thirsting to love.  Be faithful to the one who thirsts in your emptiness, to the burning heart that loves in darkness. The light meant to illuminate the night.  Salt and light are love.  Be present in your mundane, in your darkness, in suffering with those who suffer... but with love.

As you piercingly cry out to him,
as you seek Him out, the Provider of happiness,
the Giver of joy, the Riches that last and subsist forever,
while He tests your will,
see to it that you do not grow discouraged, my soul, that you do not turn back,
that you do not say: "How long will he remain so incomprehensible to me?"
that you do not say: "Why, when he has just appeared, does he again hide himself?
How long yet will He heap troubles upon me instead of mercy?"
That you do not say: "How can I undergo until the end such crosses?"
But do not shrink back, O my soul, in seeking the Master,
but as a soul which has once and for all given itself over to its own death,
do not grope to seek your own ease,
do not seek out glory,
nor the pleasure of the body,
nor the affections of the neighbors. Do not look at all to the right nor to the left, 
but, as you have begun, so even run more ardently!
Make haste always to apprehend, to seize the Master!
As often as He should disappear, even 10,000 times, likewise 10,000 times He will appear to you and thus He who cannot be grasped
will be grasped by you.
10,000 times, or rather as long as you still breathe,
seek with greater ardor to run towards him!
For He will not forsake you, He will not forget you.
Little by little, nay, He will even show Himself more and more.
And the more frequently, my soul, the Master will be present to you,
and after having perfectly purified you by the radiance of His light,
He Himself, the Creator of the world, will be with you.
He Himself will be with you, the Creator of the world.
And you will have real riches such as the world does not possess,
but such as Heaven and those who are inscribed there possess.
If such will be yours, tell me, what more do you desire?
SAINT SYMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN 

A Voice Praying in the Desert

There has been a lot said about "the desert of love"

Love seeks the desert because the desert is where man is handed over to God, stripped bare of his country, his friends, his fields, his home. In the desert, a person neither possesses what he loves, nor is he possessed by those who love him; he is totally submitted to God in an immense and intimate encounter.

That is why in every age the Holy Spirit has compelled all lovers to seek the desert.

We, missionaries without a boat, are seized by the same love and led by the same Spirit into new deserts.

From a sand dune, dressed in white, the missionary overlooks an expanse of lands filled with unbaptized peoples. From the top of a long subway staircase, dressed in an ordinary suit or raincoat, we overlook, on each step, during this busy rush-hour time, an expanse of heads, of bustling tling heads, waiting for the door to open. Caps, berets, hats, and hair of every color. Hundreds of heads - hundreds of souls. And there we stand, above.

And above us, and everywhere, is God.

God is everywhere - and how many souls even take notice?

In a moment, when the subway doors open, we'll climb aboard. We'll see faces, foreheads, eyes, and mouths. Mouths of lonely people, in their natural state: some greedy, some impure, some malicious; some mouths that hunger, some filled with every earthly sustenance, but few - very few - that bear the form of the Gospel.

Once we arrive at our station, we will surface into the dark, breathe the night air, and go down the street that leads home.

In the fog, the rain, or the moonlight, we will pass by other people. We will overhear them talking about their purchases, about butter, about money, about promotions, about fear, about quarrels - but hardly ever about the one we love.

To the right, to the left, stand darkened houses with tiny cracks of light, announcing that there are people alive in all this blackness.

We can well imagine what they are doing. They are constructing their fragile joys, bearing their long suffering, doing some good, doing much that is sinful.

We cannot help wonder how little light there would be if a light shined only for each person in prayer.

Yes, we have our deserts - and love leads us into them.

The same Spirit that leads our white-robed brothers and sisters into their deserts, also leads our beating heart down the turbulent stairways, into the subways, and up again to the darkened streets.

We do not envy our religious brothers and sisters.

In this crowd, heart against heart, crushed between so many bodies, on the seat we share with these three strangers, in the darkened street, our heart beats like a fist closed upon a bird.

The Holy Spirit, the whole Holy Spirit in our tiny heart, a love great as God is beating within us, like a moiling sea struggling to break out, to spread out, to penetrate into all these closed-up creatures, into all these impermeable souls.

To be able to pace every street, to sit in every metro, climb up every staircase, carry the Lord God to all places: we are certain to find a soul here or there that has preserved her human fragility before the grace of God, a soul that has forgotten to armor herself in gold or concrete.

And we can pray, pray just as they pray in all the other deserts, pray for all these people so close to us, so close to God.

A desert of people. We can plunge into the crowd as if plunging into the white desert sands.

A crowded desert, a desert of love.

The nakedness of real love.

And we do not miss the countryside, or the friend who would understand stand what we have on our hearts,or the quiet hour in the corner of a church, or the favorite book left at home.

The desert is where we become love's prey.

Won't this love that dwells in us, that explodes in us, also transform us?

Lord, Lord, let the thick skin that covers me not be a hindrance to you. Pass through it. My eyes, my hands, my mouth are yours.

This sad lady in front of me: here is my mouth for you to smile at her.

This child so pale he's almost gray: here are my eyes for you to gaze at him.

This man so tired, so weary: here is my body so that you may give him my seat, here is my voice so that you may say softly to him, "Please sit down."

This smug young man, so dull, so hard: here is my heart, that you may love him, more strongly than he has ever been loved before.

Missions to the desert, unfailing missions, sure missions, missions in which we sow God in the midst of the world, certain that, somewhere, he will take root, for: "There where love is lacking, put love, and you will reap love."

by Servant of God, Madeleine Delbrel. We, the Ordinary People of the Streets (Ressourcement: Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought) (Kindle Locations 818-824). Kindle Edition.

Recognize and embrace the bridegroom who is with you always... 

Learn to see him in every moment, present,

Whether....

Christ in Mary's womb,

Christ the child

Christ lost in Jerusalem

Christ at Cana,

Christ calling the apostles

Christ the Healer

Christ the Teacher

Christ the friend

Christ the servant

Christ the king

Christ crowned with thorns

Christ scourged

Christ in prison

Christ alone

Christ in agony

Christ carrying the cross

Christ walking on water

Christ broken and given,

Christ risen

Christ ascended

...

Christ of Tabor or

Christ Crucified.